Magnify

When my mother was 17 years old, my grandmother (“Bunky”) summoned her to the den to “have a talk,” which only meant bad news. Mom remembers following her mother into the den and scanning her memory for what she might have done to get into trouble. The den is a small room with built-in bookshelves and two chairs for reading. There is an old TV and a lamp, and it is the room where as a child, Bunky and I had art shows. For me it was a room for books and drawing, but for my mother the den had always been a room for punishments. On that day, with the door closed firmly behind them, my grandmother turned around and said, “A woman who has sex before she is married is nothing but a common whore!” At 17, Mom was still a virgin and the words were a slap in the face. It was the sixties, a time of peace and free love, but my grandmother was preaching from a pulpit of the past. Bunky’s language wove the strands of sex and shame into my mother’s head, and she remained a virgin until she married my father, two years later.

When I began to show interest in the opposite sex, instead of hauling me into the den and yelling about being a whore (we didn’t even have a den), Mom said nothing. I learned about the birds and the bees through trial and error. We had a hardback copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves in our house, and my sister and I used to pull it down from the bookshelf, stuff it under our shirts and sneak it upstairs to our rooms to pore over the illustrations of naked male and female bodies, but Mom never talked to me about sex. Instead, I learned about sex my freshman year from the older girls at boarding school during late night “rag sessions.” After study hall, we snuck from our rooms to the common room, and sat in a circle to listen to the older girls’ stories of sex. They’d had sex in the backseats of cars, in motel rooms, and in the woods behind the science building. Sitting quietly and hanging on every deliciously scandalous word, I couldn’t wait to join the conversation. But the older girls never explained how to enjoy sex. They didn’t have the language to translate the act of sex into something other than an accomplishment, or a step on the ladder of popularity.

We learned additional information about the language of sex in our mandatory health class, which was taught by the assistant headmaster’s wife. Oddly enough, on our ultra-liberal campus (we called all our teachers by their first names, spent semesters camping in the Grand Canyon and rock climbing); it was a progressive class, something that had never been done. I remember watching our teacher striding across campus, her back straight, her skirt below the knees, her hair cut short and smooth, and thinking there was more to her than I could see. Laurie separated the class by gender to make us more comfortable, and we met once a week for an hour in the dining hall to listen to her talk about the female body. Walking up the hill toward the dining hall with my friends, I felt a flutter in my chest. We girls didn’t speak as we entered the large room, and our footsteps echoed on the hardwood floors as we quickly found our seats. This is where we eat, I thought, as I found a seat at a large, wooden table and listened to Laurie explain how our bodies worked. I remember that her background was in science, and the language she used to teach the class was technical. She had a poster diagram of the female sexual organs up on the stage, and in a prim voice, pointed out the vagina, clitoris, cervix, uterus and fallopian tubes. It was completely foreign, and I sat transfixed in my chair and a little scared. I knew when I came later that day for spaghetti, I would be thinking about our teacher having sex with her husband, and was horrified by my imagination. Afterward we walked out of the class in groups of twos and threes and talked about how it had all been “disgusting” and “totally gross.” I knew more about the workings of the female anatomy, but I still didn’t understand anything about pleasure or passion or how sex could make me feel good.

I lost my virginity that summer so that when I went back to school in the fall, I would have a story to tell. But sex was disappointing and I thought to myself, that’s it? Even with Laurie’s diagram, my body was a mystery to me. The boys I had sex with over the years knew even less about the female body, and I couldn’t translate. It was too embarrassing to talk about sex, too risky, and for years, I engaged in mediocre sex because I didn’t know what I was missing and I was too ashamed to speak the words. Then I met my husband and discovered that shame didn’t belong in the vocabulary of sex. But before too long, sex became the means to achieve the end of having babies. Slowly, our boys are growing older, learning to do things for themselves, and my body is returning to me. After two decades of being sexually active, I’m finally discovering the pleasures of my body, and there is no shame involved.

My grandmother is 86 years old now, and losing her memory piece by piece. When I see her, she can’t remember the names of my children and asks me over and over again who they are. Bunky seems to remember the past more clearly than the present, and I wonder if she remembers using the word “whore” in that conversation with my mother so many years before. I don’t have a daughter, yet, so maybe the pattern of shame and sex will be broken with me. But even if I don’t have a daughter to teach about the pleasures and joy of the female body, I will do my best to talk to my boys so when they become interested in girls, they will understand the language. And hopefully, they won’t be afraid to speak.

Amy S. Mercer is a freelance writer living in Charleston, SC, with her husband and two sons and possibly, nine months from now, a daughter.